Axe continues to fall at Cisco

Industry bellwether Cisco is continuing to cut jobs even after a wave of restructuring.

Cisco plans to cut about 1,300 jobs as part of “ongoing efforts to restructure the company”. These are more ongoing than the last ongoing efforts, which are clearly still, er going on.

In a press release the company said “it was performing a focused set of limited restructurings” that will “collectively impact approximately two percent” of our global employee population. The Techeye universal translator turned this phrase into “we have been watching our staff like hawks and think two percent of them should not have been hired in the first place and we plan to drop them.” By making it a global cull, it is hoped that no one will notice.

These actions are part of a continuous process to simplify the company and assess the economic environment in certain parts of the world, it said.

Cisco had 65,223 employees at the end of its fiscal third quarter, according to its website. We guess it will have a few less by the end of the next quarter.

Cisco said that it had started a plan to cut expenses by $1 billion in an effort to make the company leaner and more efficient. We thought this just meant replacing all the chips in the staff cafe with a dollop of tofu. At the time it said it planned to cut 15 percent of its workforce and we expected these to have gone by now.